Are reasons normatively basic?

Understanding reasons is essential both for understanding human behavior and for constructing a theory of moral conduct. Reasons have been widely viewed as the most basic elements in normative theory, and moral reasons have been considered the most basic elements in ethics. Arguably, rational acts are those best supported by reasons, and morally right acts are those best supported by moral reasons. There is little doubt, however, that what is good is also important for both the rationality and the morality of actions. Given these points, this paper explores four related questions: What kinds of elements, say facts or propositional attitudes, constitute (normative) reasons for action? What is the relation between considerations of value—for instance regarding the intrinsically good or intrinsically bad—and normative reasons for action? Are reasons—for belief as well as for actions—equivalent to grounds for them? And how do answers to these questions bear on ethical theory? This paper provides a partial theory of reasons, values, and grounds that distinguishes different kinds of reason-ascribing locutions, reveals, in the light of that distinction, a kind of normative dependence of reasons on values, and represents both reasons and values as metaphysically grounded in elements of experience.